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Lightsource Connects 23 New Solar Sites in One Month

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Published: Friday, 15 January 2016 09:57

Lightsource Renewable Energy, Europe’s leading solar energy company, has connected 23 new sites in December totalling more than 100MW of new capacity. This includes 14 sites connected under the Feed-In tariff (FIT) and 9 sites under the Renewable Obligations Certificate (ROC) schemes.

As well as a bumper month of connections, Lightsource has a busy New Year ahead with plans to connect a further 14 ground-mount sites totalling 92MW by March 31st – to take its total installed capacity in the UK to 1.3GW.

Nick Boyle, CEO of Lightsource, said: “Despite the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the industry in recent months, we’ve seen a great many successes in 2015 and this latest round of connections is a great way for us to end the year. We are certainly no stranger to tough deadlines and difficult weather conditions, but it’s a huge testament to the capabilities of our in-house teams that we are able to complete such a mammoth task in a very short period of time.”

In response to the recent UK government changes to the solar subsidy mechanism, Lightsource will be installing and connecting its first subsidy-free sites in 2016. The Lightsource private-wire Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) will see large-scale solar sites “hard-wired” directly into large electricity users – comfortably beating the retail price that they are paying for electricity.

Nick added: “Whilst we are still taking stock of the recent government announcements concerning solar subsidies, we have big plans for 2016 and expect it to be another busy year. The UK solar industry has made great strides towards a subsidy-free environment. During the FiT and ROC regimes, we have worked hard to drive down costs and built a solid base of knowledge and expertise, which has prepared us for developing our first large-scale sites free of government support. However, it’s a great shame that the cuts to FIT will mean that domestic and commercial & industrial rooftop solar will not be able to enjoy the same success.”